Tom Benn > Tom's Quotes

“The first demand any work of art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way. (There is no good asking first whether the work before you deserves such a surrender, for until you have surrendered you cannot possibly find out.)”
― C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism

“The second cause of failure to enact good stems from conflict of intention. High intelligence leads to multiplicity of interest and a sharpened capacity to foresee the consequences of any action. Will is lost in a labyrinth of hypothesis.”
― John Fowles, Áristos

“All gods who receive homage are cruel. All gods dispense suffering without reason. Otherwise they would not be worshipped. Through indiscriminate suffering men know fear and fear is the most divine emotion. It is the stones for altars and the beginning of wisdom. Half gods are worshipped in wine and flowers. Real gods require blood.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“Good fiction’s job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.”
― David Foster Wallace

“We are homesick most for the places we have never known.”
― Carson McCullers

“Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“...poets generally write as if they were dead.”
― Ivy Compton-Burnett

“Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“Being a Humanist means trying to behave decently without expectation of rewards or punishment after you are dead.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“If there is a special Hell for writers it would be in the forced contemplation of their own works, with all the misconceptions, the omissions, the failures that any finished work of art implies.”
― John Dos Passos

“He soon acquired the forlorn look that one sees in vegetarians.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“All novels are sequels; influence is bliss.”
― Michael Chabon

“The more you leave out, the more you highlight what you leave in.”
― Henry Green

“A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”
― Thomas Mann, Essays of Three Decades

“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'”
― Isaac Asimov

“Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Garden of Eden

“The job of a storyteller is to speak the truth. But what we feel most deeply can’t be spoken in words alone. At this level, only images connect. And here, story becomes symbol; symbol is myth. And myth is truth.”
― Alan Garner

“Anybody who doesn't know that politics is crime has got a few screws loose.”
― James Ellroy

“Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it.
Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.”
― William Faulkner

“Good writing is always about things that are important to you, things that are scary to you, things that eat you up.”
― John Edgar Wideman

“Ira ‘Mac’ McGowan, chief of the honorary Dodds men, turned up that Thursday midmorning to raise the dead and rescue Carol Dodds from martyrdom and widowhood first by recruiting her son over a
cooked breakfast followed by a warm slice of angel cake both courtesy of her maminlaw who after all knelt at the altar of hospitality, hypocrisy and false modesty, and might’ve welcomed Mac after all these years for Jim’s sake, or, equally, spiked Mac’s tea with oven cleaner for Jim’s sake, then fed his bones to the white dog that patrolled their street and one night last November got loose and tore up a family of foxes on Carol’s lawn who’d been at her bins for months, leaving Carol to find the magpies first thing, picking through dead leaf, plucking intestines like worms, while she smelled no blood only mulch and dew.”
― Tom Benn, Oxblood

“Ira ‘Mac’ McGowan, chief of the honorary Dodds men, turned up that Thursday midmorning to raise the dead and rescue Carol Dodds from martyrdom and widowhood first by recruiting her son over a cooked breakfast followed by a warm slice of angel cake both courtesy of her maminlaw who after all knelt at the altar of hospitality, hypocrisy and false modesty, and might’ve
welcomed Mac after all these years for Jim’s sake, or, equally, spiked Mac’s tea with oven cleaner for Jim’s sake, then fed his bones to the white dog that patrolled their street and one night last November got loose and tore up a family of foxes on Carol’s lawn who’d been at her bins for months, leaving Carol to find the magpies first thing, picking through dead leaf, plucking intestines like worms, while she smelled no blood only mulch and dew.”
― Tom Benn, Oxblood

“Vern rotated the nightdress like clock hands – from six thirty till midnight – to read the hem label by the window’s grey light. ‘We’ve
been to the moon and we still can’t dye nylon or polyester.’
‘I haven’t been to the moon; have you?’ she said.
‘This is polyester?’ he said.
‘You should’ve been a woman,’ she said.”
― Tom Benn, Oxblood

“Vern rotated the nightdress like clock hands – from six thirty till midnight – to read the hem label by the window’s grey light. ‘We’ve been to the moon and we still can’t dye nylon or polyester.’
‘I haven’t been to the moon; have you?’ she said.
‘This is polyester?’ he said.
‘You should’ve been a woman,’ she said.”
― Tom Benn, Oxblood

“Genuine equality means not treating everyone the same, but attending equally to everyone’s different needs.”
― Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right

“The world is a tragedy to those who feel, but a comedy to those who think.”
― Horace Walpole

“And so, for me, the only fiction that still means something today is the kind of fiction that tries to explore the possibilities of fiction beyond its own limitations; the kind of fiction that challenges the tradition that governs it; the kind of fiction that constantly renews our faith in man's intelligence and imagination rather than man's distorted view of reality; the kind of fiction that reveals man's playful irrationality rather than his righteous rationality.”
― Raymond Federman

“Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it's all a male fantasy: that you're strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren't catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you're unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride

“Creative minds are uneven, and the best of fabrics have their dull spots.”
― H.P. Lovecraft